Emeritus Professor Otto Stockmeyer has been teaching Equity & Remedies for three decades at Cooley and two other law schools. He has just finished his last class in the Land Down Under as part of Cooley’s Foreign Study Program.

One of the reasons that Cooley – alone among Michigan’s five law schools – makes Equity & Remedies a required course is its value for bar-prep purposes. Equity or Remedies or both are listed by 22 states as tested on the essay portion of their bar exam, including the biggies: New York, California, and Michigan.

Some other states (including Florida) do not separately test Equity or Remedies on their bar exams, but indicate that the topics could be tested as a component of other officially listed subjects.

And 26 states plus the District of Columbia and three U.S. territories now use the Multistate Essay Examination (MEE), and the list is growing. On the MEE, Remedies can appear as part of several listed topics, including Contracts, Federal Civil Procedure, and Real Property.

This is undoubtedly why Prof. Tracy Thomas, who has taught Remedies for more than a decade, reports that “the number one comment I get from former students and alumni [is] that Remedies helped them get ready for and feel good about the bar exam.” Tracy Thomas, Teaching Remedies as Problem-Solving: Keeping it Real, 57 Saint Louis University Law Journal __ (2013) (forthcoming) (available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2209791).

My experience has been similar. That’s one reason why I like to think of our Equity & Remedies course as the “dessert of the required curriculum,” best savoured last. Do Cooley alums agree? I welcome your comments.